It is hard for me to imagine no Times-Picayune on Monday, February 4, 2013, the day after our city hosts Super Bowl XLVII. Cities like ours deserve, and have, at least one daily paper. A city that will celebrate 300 years as a city deserves a daily newspaper.

I understand the need to embrace the evolving technology that comes with the digital media. However, I see on a daily basis the need to have a vibrant newspaper in the hands of those that have made it a daily habit to pick up the paper and read it from cover-to-cover. I proudly count myself in that number and have for much of my life. Our city needs and deserves the Times-Picayune to remain a daily newspaper, which will work hand-in-hand with your digital storytelling ventures.

I don’t know if I agree that the lack of tangible paper to hold on will change the coverage, but you can’t hand the Super Bowl MVP a Tablet to hold up with the hometown headline (actually, yes you can).

Peter Parker, aka, Spiderman, is looking for a new day job. The news, via Nerdvana:

In a sad case of art imitating life, Peter Parker, the photojournalist alter-ego of Marvel Comics superhero Spider-Man, has a new nemesis: Unemployment.

Marvel said this week that Parker will lose his day job shooting City Hall photos for the Daily Bugle and have to juggle real-world problems like mounting debt and job-hunting with his responsibility to keep the residents of New York City safe from his many villainous foes, like the Vulture.

The American Forest & Paper Assn. estimates that newsprint production in 2009 will fall by one-third, or almost 1.5 million tons, from the previous year, and magazine print by 1 million tons, or 25%. August was the 18th consecutive month of double-digit declines in U.S. newsprint consumption, according to research firm CreditSights. The paper-products industry now employs 37% fewer people than in 1990, while the forest-products industry as a whole has 34% fewer workers.

Moment of silence here for an industry that, when you account for a slumping new construction market and other circumstances, has been one of the heaviest losers during this recession.

Then again, ask those same people, and not only is the decline of print a helping hand in the destruction of their industry, the perceived “green” benefits of digitalizing news over tree-killing aren’t as big as once thought. First, newspapers are generally printed on recycled paper (the American Forest & Paper Association estimates it at around 57 percent of all print pubs came from recycled materials in 2008; via Business Week article, but the release is available on its site, PaperRecycles.org).

(Additional parenthesis: the euphemism for this is “Paper Recovery.” Message testing, noted).

So – next time you choose to not buy that newspaper: think of the logger and how we are already recovering paper to keep the environment going. Then hop online, ironically read the article from Business Week even if it’s delivered to your apartment, write a sarcastic blog post that questions the intentions of microsites like PaperRecycles.org, and then continue to read the Sunday paper online.

Plus, I had to look up what comprises the Institute for Sustainable Communication because my mind isn’t working quickly enough this morning to get through whatever that is supposed to mean. Final moment of irony: I couldn’t do that in a newspaper and I don’t think a logger could help me explain it, either.